For the second year in a row, MIT has been named the top university in the world for architecture/built environment in the latest subject rankings from QS World University Rankings. In art and design, the Institute ranked No. 2 globally, a jump from fourth position in 2015. Ten other subject areas at MIT were ranked number one.

A recent issue of The Tech, MIT's student newspaper, includes a guest opinion column by DUSP PhD students Brittany Montgomery and Rebecca Heywood, entitled "Implementing Mens et Manus: How can the Institute better integrate science and innovation with politics and community affairs?"

According to the latest edition of the Planetizen Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs, DUSP/MIT is the top planning program in North America. Since 2007, Planetizen's Guide has included rankings, and DUSP has consistently been listed as #1. This year, the University of California--Berkeley and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign round out the top three.

Congratulations to DUSP and Harvard GSD students (and by now alumni) : Edward Becker; Will Cohen; Annemarie Gray; Jelani Karamoko; Kevin McDonald; Dara Yaskil; Maggie Tishman; Simon Willett, and MIT faculty advisor Peter Roth are the receipent of the 2014 American Society of Landscape Architects Honor student award for their project: The Edgerly: The Next Generation of a Community Anchor.

Calestous Juma, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor at MIT, received a LAAP Prize (Lifetime Africa Achievement Prize) for his leadership in socio-economic development in Africa. The award will be presented to Juma in Nigeria on October 10, 2014, by the Millennium Excellence Foundation.

Play the LA River is the launch project of Project 51, a collective of artists, designers, urban planners, writers, and educators (including DUSP MCP ’10 and current PhD student, John Arroyo, who is one of six co-founders).

The Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) is a one-year non-degree program designed for mid-career professionals from developing and newly industrializing countries. SPURS was founded in 1967 as part of DUSP, and hosted in the last 47 years, 658 individuals from 115 countries all around the world.

Two MIT CoLab Mel King Community Fellows (MKCF), Ai-Jen Poo (2013-2014) and Rick Lowe (2014) have been selected as 2014 MacArthur Fellows. Ai-Jen Poo is Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, her MKCFs cohort has been focused on labor/community partnerships and innovative approaches to organizing worker power. Rick Lowe is Founder of Project Row Houses, his MKCFs cohort is focused on how the field of urban planning can be animated with the creativity and criticality of artist's perspectives.

Cellphone apps that find users car rides in real time are exploding in popularity: The car-service company Uber was recently valued at $18 billion, and even as it faces legal wrangles, a number of companies that provide similar services with licensed taxi cabs have sprung up.What if the taxi-service app on your cellphone had a button on it that let you indicate that you were willing to share a ride with another passenger? How drastically could cab-sharing reduce traffic, fares, and carbon dioxide emissions?

Carey Anne Nadeau (MCP, Feb ‘15) has been selected after a competitive proposal process, as the recipient of a $10,000 research stipend by the Graduate Research Award Program on Public-Sector Aviation Issues. Sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration of the U.S.

Congratulations to DUSP Professor Brent Ryan, who was recently awarded a "Committed to Caring” honor from the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education. The program recognizes MIT faculty members who "go above and beyond to make an impact in the lives of graduate students." Two new faculty members are recognized each month through a broad campus poster and web campaign. Honorees are determined by a selection committee made up of MIT graduate students and staff.

In her thesis Fizzah Sajjad (MCP '14) asks how opportunities emerge for states in the Global South to undertake large-scale spending on public transport, particularly in cases where they have previously withdrawn from its provision. In recent years, such opportunities have emerged in the form of mass transit mega-projects, particularly Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) mega-projects.

In his dissertation, Onesimo Flores Dewey studied how the governments of cities limited by scarce fiscal resources and weak institutions enhance their transportation planning and regulatory capacities to provide the public with cleaner, safer, efficient, and reliable public transit alternatives. Such aims are particularly challenging for cities of the developing world, in part because a quasi-informal network of privately owned transport operators has been historically responsible for satisfying the public’s mobility needs with minimal state intervention.

Francisco Humeres (MCP ’14) focused on Power Centrality as a method for measuring a particular feedback property: How well connected are places to other well connected places. In this research Power Centrality is used to assess a recent model of Urban Structure; The Splintering Urbanism Theory of Graham and Marvin (2001). This theory posits that the contemporary city is a fragmented agglomeration of isolated urban pieces where distant but valuable fragments are highly connected between them, bypassing their less valuable surroundings.

Yunke Xiang (MCP ’14) focused on how cities are trying a range of transportation policy and investment alternatives to reduce car-induced externalities. He explored why, without a solid understanding of how people behave within the constraints from transportation policies, it is hard to tell which of these policies are really doing the job and which may be inducing unintended problems. The focus of this paper is the determinants of vehicle ownership in the motorized city-state context of Singapore.

Lillian K. Steponaitis (MCP ’14) examined community-based organizations, in which success is based not only on the services they offer, but also their more intangible networks of trust, robust local relationships, and on-the-ground knowledge of community needs. As local organizations grow and seek to replicate themselves, the question of local trust and participation, the very basis of their legitimacy, is sometimes challenged.

Laura Andreae Martin (MCP '14) focuses on cooperation projects rooted in cultural ties which are receiving unprecedented attention from the international development community. When and how culture practically matters to development has not been thoroughly explored within urban planning. Her thesis examines whether, when, and how cultural affinities matter for the successful design, management, and implementation of urban planning projects in the global South with international partnerships.

This past spring semester Professor Amy Glasmeier taught her new course Geography of the Global Economy Systems in Transition: Russia, China and the U.S. The course is part of the newly launched Skoltech curriculum which is a collaboration with Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology.

Dayna Cunningham, Executive Director of the Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), recently wrote an article for The Architectural League of New York titled, Five Thousand Pound Democracy: Citizenship and Governance for a Five Thousand Pound Life.

The interdisciplinary program will bring together faculty and students from across MIT to evaluate at least three new types of products being used by people in developing countries, including solar water pumps, food aid packaging, and wheelchairs.